"I have a hope, yet I scarcely dare to bid you share it; for it grows
rather out of my heart as man than my experience as physician. I cannot
think that her soul would be now so reconciled to earth, so fondly, so
earnestly, cling to this mortal life, if it were about to be summoned
away. You know how commonly even the sufferers who have dreaded death the
most become calmly resigned to its coming, when death visibly reveals
itself out from the shadows in which its shape has been guessed and not
seen. As it is a bad sign for life when the patient has lost all will to
live on, so there is hope while the patient, yet young and with no
perceptible breach in the great centres of life (however violently their
forts may be stormed), has still intense faith in recovery, perhaps drawn
(who can say?) from the whispers conveyed from above to the soul.

"I cannot bring myself to think that all the uses for which a reason,
always so lovely even in its errors, has been restored, are yet fulfilled.
It seems to me as if your union, as yet so imperfect, has still for its
end that holy life on earth by which two mortal beings strengthen each
other for a sphere of existence to which this is the spiritual ladder.
Through yourself I have hope yet for her. Gifted with powers that rank
you high in the manifold orders of man,--thoughtful, laborious, and brave;
with a heart that makes intellect vibrate to every fine touch of humanity;
in error itself, conscientious; in delusion, still eager for truth; in
anger, forgiving; in wrong, seeking how to repair; and, best of all,
strong in a love which the mean would have shrunk to defend from the fangs
of the slanderer,--a love, raising passion itself out of the realm of the
senses, made sublime by the sorrows that tried its devotion,--with all
these noble proofs in yourself of a being not meant to end here, your life
has stopped short in its uses, your mind itself has been drifted, a bark
without rudder or pilot, over seas without shore, under skies without